Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao: Companies or Individuals Not Using Internet, Blockchain, or AI Will Be Less Competitive
Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao stated that some obvious things are still not clear to many: any company or individual that does not use the internet, blockchain, or artificial intelligence will be less competitive. This statement is a follow-up to an old post from two days ago, where he questioned why some believe banks must be feared or protected, stating that blockchain transfers are faster, cheaper, and easier to verify, and that banks can also use them.
Zhao is no longer responsible for Binance's daily operations; he publicly identifies as a co-founder, former CEO, and shareholder, and runs Giggle Academy and investment platform YZi Labs. He has placed these three technologies side by side, not as a new slogan: in April 2026, he stated in a podcast that the three major industries after adulthood are the internet, blockchain, and artificial intelligence, and that countries lacking any of these will fall seriously behind; he hopes that within five years, "crypto" will no longer be discussed separately, just as TCP/IP is no longer discussed today. In a July anniversary interview, he mentioned that crypto payments are the biggest unlock for artificial intelligence, and that using blockchain for payments is more convenient than traditional accounts for agents making payments to the other side of the world.
He does not solely praise artificial intelligence. In May, he stated that while the industry will grow, many companies will not survive, valuations will fluctuate dramatically, and new entrants will continue to emerge. In the same interview, he compared artificial intelligence to the internet: companies and individuals should push their capabilities to the limit, using it for coding, finding vulnerabilities, and design, rather than misusing it. He also pointed out that the current blockchain throughput is insufficient and that faster, cheaper chains are needed to reduce the cost of agent transactions; otherwise, demand on the model side will be bottlenecked by the settlement side.
The direction of YZi Labs aligns with this tripartite framework: crypto, artificial intelligence, and longer-term applications like biological data and on-chain identity. He repeatedly separates speculative holding of tokens from the underlying technology of the blockchain, stating that people will not "exit the internet or artificial intelligence," but always ask when to exit a specific token. The debate over bank protection clauses and stablecoin yield bans is ongoing in U.S. legislation; his statement pushes the idea that "banks can also use this technology" to the level of companies and individuals, framing non-adoption as a loss of competitiveness rather than a moral issue.
In terms of market mechanisms, this narrative provides a forced upgrade of the tech stack. Buyers want exchanges, public chains, and investment institutions to incorporate settlement, custody, and agent payments into their product roadmaps; sellers are traditional financial institutions that still price based on account systems and licensing barriers. Capital flows can provide platforms that simultaneously offer trading entry, stablecoin tracks, and on-chain throughput. Beneficiaries are existing users and ecosystems with stablecoin and public chain traffic; those under pressure are institutions that rely on "needing protection to compete" to secure legislative clauses. This event does not change the short-term order book but provides an excuse for adopting budgets: failing to engage with these three layers will be seen as choosing to fall behind.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Zhao, after turning the exchange into the world's largest fiat-crypto interface, does not equate stepping down with losing pricing power. He is now selling a historical perspective on technology: the internet is no longer optional, artificial intelligence is becoming indispensable, and blockchain should be included in the same sentence. The advantage of this narrative is that the BNB chain and YZi combination no longer need to separately prove "crypto has a future"; they only need to prove they are part of the settlement layer within these three layers. If banks accept "they can also use the chain," the moral foundation for protective legislation will weaken.
Capital movement is about investment channels rather than operational channels. YZi buys projects in a bear market, Giggle Academy serves as an educational entry point, and Binance's equity continues to benefit from trading volume, maintaining attention on new coins and public chain projects over time. Framing artificial intelligence agent payments as the biggest unlock for the chain is a pre-sale for throughput and stablecoin demand: models will place orders, and if the account system cannot make payments to global addresses 24/7, orders will flow to the chain. He also warns that many artificial intelligence companies will fail, breaking the speculative heat from a single narrative to prevent "bullish on technology" from being interpreted as "buying all artificial intelligence tokens."
The analogy is similar to saying in the 1990s that "companies not using email will fall behind," in the 2010s that "banks without mobile access will lag," and post-2023 that "software without model interfaces will become obsolete." Each time, infrastructure companies frame insufficient adoption as a survival threat, thus transforming budgets from optional projects to necessities. The industry phase is rewriting the chain from an asset class to an industrial utility—still expanding its reputation, yet not fully controlling settlement standards.
Structurally, this belongs to technological substitution. The mechanism is: competitiveness is redefined as a three-layer overlay; lacking any layer results in losing to fully stacked competitors in terms of cost, speed, and verifiability; if legislation isolates banks outside the chain, it may protect interest margins in the short term but long-term gives incremental agent payments to already on-chain entries. The role of slogans is to lower the internal cost of procurement departments saying "no."
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- Only indispensable technologies will become utilities.
- Tools that banks can use should no longer be framed as floods.
- The places where agents will place orders are where the settlement layer will see price increases.